Most wanted: answers on Zarqawi

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Zarqawi has gone from a prison tough guy to the terrorist mastermind behind some of the beheadings in Iraq, the US says. But people who know him are not so sure, writes Jeffrey Gettleman.

Ten years ago, fellow inmates remember, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi emerged as the tough-guy captain of his cell block. In prison life, that meant doling out chores.

"He'd say: 'You bring the food; you clean the floor'," recalled Khalid Abu Doma, who was jailed with Zarqawi for plotting against the Jordanian Government. "He didn't have great ideas. But people listened to him because they feared him."

According to US officials, Zarqawi has come a long way since then, and is now the biggest terrorist threat in Iraq, accused of orchestrating guerilla attacks, suicide bombings, kidnappings and beheadings. Last week, he claimed responsibility for a mortar barrage that killed five US soldiers and an Iraqi soldier.

American views of Zarqawi's relationship to al-Qaeda have varied. Secretary of State Colin Powell has described him as an al-Qaeda operative, but a senior US military official said sources suggest that Zarqawi was "a separate jihadist".

He remains a target: US forces are stepping up strikes on buildings they believe to be his safe houses in Fallujah and have raised the bounty on him to $US25 million ($A35 million), the price that is also on Osama bin Laden's head.

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For all that, little is known of Zarqawi's whereabouts or his operations.

In Jordan, where he stamped strong impressions on people as he climbed the ladder of outlaw groups, friends and associates described the making of a militant. They say he grew up in rough-and-tumble circumstances and adopted religion with the same intensity he showed for drinking and fighting, though he became far less a revolutionary mastermind than a dull-witted hothead with gruff charisma.

Those who knew Zarqawi until he disappeared into Afghanistan four years ago acknowledge that he may have changed. But they say that while the Zarqawi they knew could be brutal, they have a hard time imagining him as the guiding light of an Iraqi insurgency.

"When we would write bad things about him in our prison magazine, he would attack us with his fists," said Yousef Rababa, who was in jail with Zarqawi for militant activity. "That's all he could do. He's not like bin Laden with ideas and vision. He had no vision."

Zarqawi, thought to be 37, grew up in Zarqa, a crime-ridden industrial city north of Amman.

He came from a poor family of 10 children. His father was a traditional healer. His mother struggled with leukaemia. His birth name was Ahmed Fadeel al-Khalayleh.

Childhood friends say he was much like any other boy. At 17, family members say, he dropped out of school. Friends said he had started drinking heavily and getting tattoos, both discouraged under Islam. According to Jordanian intelligence reports, Zarqawi was jailed in the 1980s for sexual assault, though no details were available.

By the time he was in his early 20s he was adrift, his family said, and, like many other young Arab men looking for a cause, looked north-east, to Afghanistan.

Saleh al-Hami, Zarqawi's brother-in-law, said Zarqawi arrived in eastern Afghanistan in 1989 to join the jihad against the Soviet Union. But the Soviets had just pulled out. So Zarqawi became a reporter for a small jihadist magazine. He was 22 and roamed the countryside interviewing Arab fighters about the glorious battles he had missed.

Hami and Zarqawi grew close. One night while they were camping, he recalled, Zarqawi shared a special dream. He said he saw a vision of a sword falling from the sky. Jihad was written on its blade.

Zarqawi returned to Zarqa in 1992 and fell in with a militant Islamic group, Bayaat al-Imam, or Loyalty to the Imam. He was arrested in 1993 after assault rifles and bombs were found in his house. His lawyer said Zarqawi lamely told investigators that he found the weapons on the street. "He never struck me as intelligent," the lawyer said.

Zarqawi was jailed and housed with other political prisoners. Cellmates said Zarqawi turned his bunk into a cave, covering each side with blankets. He sat for hours bent over a Koran, trying to memorise all 6236 verses. Friends say this was typical; he never did things by halves.

He strutted around in Afghan dress and a woolly Afghan hat and lived and breathed old Afghan battles. "Back then he liked Americans," Abu Doma said. "Abu Musab used to say they were Christian and they were believers." The Soviets were his No. 1 enemy but, like many other beliefs, this would change behind bars. In the wing where Zarqawi lived, ideologies intertwined. But cellmates said Zarqawi shied away from politics. Instead, he pumped iron.

As the years passed, Zarqawi's role grew. He mapped out shifts for cleaning, bringing meals to cells and visiting the doctor. He did not talk much.

His firmness was his attraction, fellow inmates said, his remoteness his power. By 1998, when prison doctor Basil Abu Sabha met him, Zarqawi was clearly in charge. "He could order his followers to do things just by moving his eyes," Abu Sabha said.

His religious views became increasingly severe. He had been exposed to militant beliefs served up by the imams and sheikhs in the iron bunks next to him. He lashed out at cellmates if they read anything but the Koran.

Abu Doma said he got a threatening note for reading Crime and Punishment. "He spelt Dostoyevsky 'Doseefski'," Abu Doma said, laughing. "The note was full of bad Arabic, like a child wrote it."

Fellow inmates said that around that time, 1998, just as al-Qaeda was emerging as a serious threat and being blamed for the bombings of two US embassies in Africa, Zarqawi started talking about killing Americans.

In March 1999, Zarqawi was released under an amnesty. His associates said they expected him to return to jail. "Because of his views, there was no place for him in Jordan," said Rababa, explaining that the mostly secular country was no place for an extremist. Rababa said his own views softened, but to Zarqawi "everyone was the enemy". Zarqawi had hopes for a normal life, according to Hami, who said he had at least two children and had thought of buying a truck and opening a vegetable stand. But early in 2000, Zarqawi went to Peshawar, on the Pakistan side of the Afghan border. It was a deeply religious city, which made it attractive to him.

At the doorstep of jihad, he hesitated. "He said it was Muslims fighting Muslims in Afghanistan and he didn't believe in the cause," Hami said.

While Zarqawi was deciding what to do, his Pakistani visa expired. Around the same time, Jordan declared him a suspect in a foiled terror plot against a Christian pilgrimage site.

In June 2000, Hami said, Zarqawi crossed into Afghanistan, alone. His mother died in February this year. Hami said her last wish was for her son to be killed in battle, not captured. American intelligence officials said Zarqawi opened a weapons camp connected to al-Qaeda in late 2000 in Afghanistan. There he took up his new name.

US officials said he was wounded in a missile strike as American forces went after the Taliban and al-Qaeda after the September 11, 2001 attacks. But several sources in Jordan said they had heard that he had been shot in the leg by al-Qaeda agents, who thought he was a spy.

Intelligence officials say he then left Afghanistan and made his way to a corner of northern Iraq controlled by a Kurdish separatist Islamic group called Ansar al-Islam. There, according to some reports, he set up a chemical weapons training camp. The next sighting of him was in September 2002, when Jordanian agents said he illegally entered Jordan from Syria. The agents said he was living in Syria at the time, not in northern Iraq.

A month later, a senior American diplomat was shot dead outside his home in Amman. Jordanian agents arrested three men who, the agents said, told them that they had been recruited, armed and paid by Zarqawi. He was sentenced to death in absentia.

In February last year, Powell made his assertions about Zarqawi at the United Nations. Powell stands by his statement, a spokesman said, even though other parts of that speech have been discredited and Powell mistakenly identified Zarqawi as Palestinian.

Other US information about Zarqawi has also been incorrect, including a report that he had a leg amputated in Baghdad.

At the beginning of the Iraq war, Zarqawi and the Ansar fighters were driven out of Kurdistan. In August, a car bomb blew up the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, the first in a string of bombings. Zarqawi, because of his history as an anti-Jordan militant, was immediately a suspect.

In February, American officials in Baghdad released a letter that they said was from Zarqawi to al-Qaeda's leadership. The 6700-word manifesto took credit for 25 suicide bombings and outlined a terror strategy to drag Iraq into civil war.

But people who know Zarqawi wonder if he was the author. They said the lengthy political analysis, the references to seventh-century kings and embroidered phrases such as "crafty and malicious scorpion" do not sound like Zarqawi.

American officials stand by their claim and Iraqi officials back up the American depiction of Zarqawi. Iraq's Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, has named him as the culprit behind a terrorism campaign that has killed hundreds of civilians.

The director of Iraq's intelligence services, Mohammed Abdullah Mohammed Shehwani, said Zarqawi is "the biggest threat right now to Iraq's future".

Some of his support may be fading, though. Terrorism experts say there is an increasing divide between Zarqawi and home-grown insurgents, who have opposed attacks against Iraqi civilians.

But the mystery remains. On May 11, a video, titled "Sheikh Abu Musab Zarqawi slaughters an American infidel", appeared. It showed the beheading of US businessman Nicholas Berg. American officials believe that Zarqawi may have been the killer.

But back in Amman, there are questions. The killer cuts with his right hand. And while Hami said he thought Zarqawi was right-handed, Rababa and Abu Doma, who shared the same room with Zarqawi for several years, insisted that Zarqawi used his right hand only for eating and shaking hands.